Find The Smallest And Largest Values With MIN And MAX

Use `MIN` and `MAX` to find the lowest and highest values in a column.

5/5 supported engines validation-green 1 example 2 scenarios

Docker-validated Not currently validation-green

Example 1

Find the coldest and hottest recorded temperatures

Chicago (15) is the coldest and Miami (32) is the hottest. Both functions scan all rows and return a single aggregate value. Add GROUP BY city to find the min and max per city instead of across the whole table.

Source table data Rows loaded before the example query runs.

Setup

CREATE TABLE temperatures (id INT, city VARCHAR(50), temp INT);

INSERT INTO
  temperatures (id, city, temp)
VALUES
  (1, 'NYC', 22),
  (2, 'LA', 28),
  (3, 'Chicago', 15),
  (4, 'Miami', 32);

Validated query Shared across supported engines.

SQL

SELECT
  MIN(temp) AS min_temp,
  MAX(temp) AS max_temp
FROM
  temperatures;

Expected result Returned rows for the shared example.

min_temp	max_temp
15	32

Output is identical across all engines.

Useful when

Where this command helps.

finding the smallest and largest values in a column
getting the full range of a dataset in a single query

Explanation

What the command is doing.

MIN(column) returns the smallest value in the column and MAX(column) returns the largest. Both ignore NULL values. They work on numbers, dates, and strings — for strings, the comparison is lexicographic. Both can be combined in a single query and work with GROUP BY to find extremes per category.

Find The Smallest And Largest Values With MIN And MAX

Find the coldest and hottest recorded temperatures

Where this command helps.

What the command is doing.

Keep moving through nearby tasks.